Soon, probably, I’m going to kill Lori. She has it coming. When the live lobsters are ferried to the kitchen for steaming, the visions overwhelm me, divine visions of Lori’s dispatch by toothpick to the brain. Last week, a server lit a birthday candle on the molten ribs of the heat lamps, and I wondered if I couldn’t do the same with Lori’s index finger. If every jury in America found me guilty, I wouldn’t feel it. If she survived and asked me why I did it, I’d do it again.
She’s trundling over now with that look like she’s had an accident and I’m supposed to come clean it up. A question stuck in her submandibular calculus: “Where are the brown bags?”
“Under the counter.”
Six months she’s worked here.
“I don’t see them.”
I’m rotating the cheesecakes, new behind old, on my knees with my head in the cooler. Visibly indisposed, but Lori doesn’t care. The fans groan like seismic waves. “Juke Box Blues” is playing. I’ve been at work ten hours and my shirt is coming untucked and my belt is chafing me phenomenally, and later my boyfriend Art is coming over to jizz on my stomach, he’ll see the belt rash, and a belt rash isn’t the most enticing thing to jizz on as far as things to jizz on are concerned which means he might end up doing it on my face. So forgive me.
“If there’s none there, get the big box from dry storage.”
“Where is dry storage?”
You see what I mean.
In a world where Lori’s dead, I’m grim and pretty on the stand, a trim finger pointed. I tell them, I didn’t want this job. After the Ann Taylor I’d been working at was burgled, I found, in unemployment, I was really a fine person. I cleaned my fridge and unclogged my bathtub and finished X-Files. I recreated myself and David Duchovny in The Sims, with uncanny precision. We bought a Georgian mansion overlooking a sparkling bayou. On our honeymoon, we went camping and fucked inside a rosebush.
My sister Randy was convinced I was depressed. That my sudden productivity meant I was planning on killing myself. I’ve been on Randy’s suicide watch since I was twelve and she fifteen, when she found me cutting my wrists with a toenail clipper. Now she treats me like a dog about to be euthanized, slipping me chocolates.
I’m not planning on killing myself. But I’m not exactly planning on living either. Randy used to write in this fuchsia Moleskine journal about her future. There were flowcharts and dichotomies. Last year, I turned twenty-two, and she bought me my own journal, in olive. I use it principally when Art is atop of me, begging me to hit him, preferably with my open palm but sure, that’s fine, the journal works too. When I think about my future, I see what blind people see. Not darkness, only nothing. The idea of dying young saddens me, and Randy would lose her mind, but I wouldn’t necessarily feel defrauded.
Randy offered me a job working takeout at the seafood restaurant she manages. She wasn’t so much trying to rescue me from suicide as she was trying to cover shifts, but she’d like me to believe it was a little of both. In her journal she once wrote, I want to be good, fifty times in her perfect, gummy handwriting. Like she knew someone, someday, would read it.
If the olive Moleskine journal is ever subpoenaed, I’m in big trouble. THE LORI MANIFESTO, I’ve marked permanently on the inside cover. I log my observations.
1/19 – Can’t count back change without supervision. Note for future
1/20 – Caught loafing around where she’s not supposed to be again
1/22 – Can’t prep salads or desserts without supervision
1/25 – Can’t answer phone without supervision
1/26 – Broke dress code today
1/27 – Hair always wet, reeks like a hotel pool (?)
1/31 – Her teeth are yellow and all the same size
2/1 – Saw inside of her nostril
2/3 – Eyes somehow getting farther apart
2/4 – Today she slipped because she still doesn’t have non-slip shoes and she gasped like someone unplugged her CPAP machine even though I warned her
2/6 – At 5:48pm her necklace caught the sunset and blinded me
Tonight, Lori is working by herself; Art comes over. He suggests we order takeout from the restaurant, he’s craving catfish, I get a discount, and it’s not really a suggestion.
While he’s gone, I open The Sims. After nineteen hours of nonstop sex, David Duchovny suffers overexertion and dies. My virtual self apes grief by hanging her head, cursing God in her pidgin tongue. When David returns as a ghost, I try to make them fuck again but the option is grayed out. Your Sim is too sad to do this right now. I see David Duchovny, the real one, through his hologram’s blown-glass eyes. He tells me he can feel everything. I quit the game without saving.
Art returns, pink with cold. “Do you know the girl doing the takeout orders tonight?”
Fucking obviously I do.
“It was so weird. She didn’t say a word. I gave her the order, she put it in the computer, I paid, the order came out, and she didn’t open her mouth once. But everything is correct, I checked. She got my extra tartar sauce. I don’t know. It was just the weirdest thing.”
2/10 – Art thinks Lori is weird. Note for future
It’s slow today, and Lori is by some heavenly miracle not getting on my last nerve. “Lori, I feel like I know nothing about you.”
“Huh?”
“What do you do for fun?”
She shrugs.
“Do you live around here?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you have kids? Or pets? Are you married?”
She makes this face like sure, why not.
Something inside me breaks. Let the record show, I tried. I’m not a hateful person. I hear myself saying, “Are you mute? Is that it? Is that why you can’t talk to customers? Are you some kind of mute, abused orangutan? Just whiling away the hours in your enclosure, flinging suitcases and pressing your big shitty anus to the glass? Am I getting warmer? Is there an actual person in there, or are you just a big dumb fucking orangutan? What is your fucking problem, Lori?”
But Lori just stands there, staring. Even an orangutan would understand it’s being yelled at. I’m reminded of when Randy and I were young, playing The Game of Life. At the beginning, we each chose a plastic car and a miniature pink figurine, our in-game proxy. Whatever random successes and failures befell us only ever befell the pink figurine, who didn’t care either way, who understood no matter which cards life dealt her—poor or rich, loved or not—she’d always end up back in the box, waiting until the next time we played the game. That’s how Lori’s looking at me. Shipwrecked on a desert island—sure, why not.
Because she’s my sister, Randy doesn’t say anything when I confess I’ve thought about killing Lori. She tilts her head when I compare Lori to a Game of Life figurine, squints when I tell her to imagine placing one between her teeth and chewing. It feels like murder, spitting out the mangled pink plastic, until you really look. You won’t see a face. You won’t see anything.
In The Sims, I recreate Lori. I pull and strip her flesh. I dress her in the closest approximation to our work uniform. I’m prompted to choose her character traits, but like I said, I know nothing about her.
In the Georgian mansion, David Duchovny is still alive. I lock him and Lori in the bathroom, and with some persistence, I coax them into the marble shower. They are gentle with each other. I stomp through the house.
I separate Lori from the household and send her away. Under Options, I adjust the lifespan of non-playable Sims to the shortest possible setting, and I wait. In time, I’ll check in and find Lori has died, and the parasite inside me that made me hate her will die as well. In the meantime, David and I raise children. I remodel the kitchen and build a gazebo. The seasons change.
I die of old age. An urn materializes on the fireplace; my family’s icons turn miserable indigo. When the Grim Reaper appears, I scroll inward to confirm if on his skeletal hands there isn’t the faintest pink trace of Lori’s blood. By all logic, she should be dead. Survived by nobody, her estate distributed to the commonwealth. But the relief doesn’t come. She must still be alive, or I wouldn’t still feel the parasite inside me. Or she’s dead, and the thing I most wanted was something totally different after all.
I shut my laptop. It’s six in the morning; it’s snowing. When Art went to bed, my youngest was being born. I want to ask him if, when he jizzes on my stomach, he can see the parasite moving. If it moves inside him, if it moves inside everyone. But he’s snoring. His chest rises and falls. His eyelids flicker. I’ll have to wait until later.
